Why is Milvus being depracated?

[slizb]

In the documentation, there is this depracation notice for the Milvus document store:
The MilvusDocumentStore is deprecated and will be removed from Haystack starting with version 1.17!
Can anyone elaborate as to why Milvus support is being removed? I'm having trouble searching up any related issues.

Thank you!

[silvanocerza]

Hey @slizb.
Currently we have tons of different document stores and it's becoming costly and difficult maintaining all of them.
In an effort to make Haystack easier to maintain we're encouraging contributors to create new document stores in external projects, see QdrantDocumentStore, and purging existing ones according to a bunch of criteria including popularity, ease of maintenance, and external support. For example, Weaviate is helping us by contributing directly.

Milvus was just a good candidate according to those criteria, it's not related to its capabilities.

Hope this answered your question. In any case I'm converting this into a discussion as it's not a real issue.

[slizb]

I see. Thank you for the quick response! So for Milvus, it has popularity, and external support, but not ease of maintenance?

[silvanocerza]

It's a combination of those to be fair.

In any case we discussed internally about this, you're not the first one that is concerned with its removal.
We'll probably remove it from the core Haystack project and move it to the extras repository.

I'd suggest you join our Discord to get updates on this.

[silvanocerza]

@slizb we created a pinned discussion regarding the Milvus deprecation.
#4785